The Computational Media Lab at the ANU focus on computational problems for understanding online media and their interactions with and among humans. We develop core methods in machine learning and optimization. We also formulate and solve problems in understanding online behavior, multimedia and the broader implications of machine intelligence.
You may be interested in sampling the recent blog posts below, look at our research summary, publications, all past posts, or navigate by categories and tags.
We analysed the 7-year history of /r/AmITheAsshole, asked two questions and got two surprising answers.
Thanks to Eric Byler for a 2022 profile article in college news!
We identify Reddit’s Am I the Asshole (AITA) forum as a rich source of data to investigate the moral sphere using AI and machine learning. This work is done with Josh Nguyen and Alasdair Tran, and ANU philosophers Colin Klein, Nick Carroll, and most recently Nick Schuster.
Read MoreWe develop a fully end-to-end news image captioning system that can generate entity names.
In our recent paper published in CVPR 2020, we propose an end-to-end model that can generate linguistically-rich captions for news images. We also build a live demo where people can generate a caption for any New York Times article.
Read MoreWe present a new interactive webapp for exploring the rich intellectual heritage of academic entities.
In our recent paper in IEEE VIS’19, we introduced a new visual metaphor, called the Influence Flowers to represent flow influence between academic entities including people, publication venues, institutions, and topics.
Read MoreThree timelines in developing and adopting cars may shed light on what humanity would do with machine intelligence.
Fig. 1: Overview of three concurrently evolving timelines in the development of cars2. Top (green) - key events in engine and early system developments. Middle (red) - key events in car and road-safety related legislations. Bottom (blue) - rough separation of eras in car styling. Key events selected from Wikipedia narratives on cars and history of the automobile3. See article for discussion. For readability, time scales are not uniform.
Read MoreA new machine learning system that styles your caption like master story-tellers do.
The craft of paper writing can be mastered using recipes.
I like cakes, and I enjoy reading logically lucid research articles. This post argues that research papers can benefit from explicitly thinking about and planning its four logical layers, just like a multi-layered Mille-feuille, or Napoleon cake (image credit: alyonascooking).
Read MoreHow tricks from computer vision and deep learning can be used to accelerate planning algorithms
Planning algorithms try to find series of actions which enable an intelligent agent to achieve some goal.
Such algorithms are used everywhere from manufacturing to robotics to power distribution.
In our recent paper at AAAI ‘18, we showed how to use deep learning techniques from vision and natural language processing to teach a planning system to solve entire classes of sophisticated problems by training on a few simple examples.
Read MoreSiqi and Alex received sports and community accolades, respectively. The lab enjoyed two outings in town.
Sports is a prominent theme in Canberra. This post celebrates two of our competitive athletes, and looks back at two outings when the whole lab flexed our muscles and got a little bit wet.
Read MoreThe Hawkes Intensity Process (HIP) inspired a small cascade of puns, and a research-team-in-uniform
How much promotion is required, and why should one constantly promote?
“The fundamental scarcity in the modern world is the scarcity of attention.” – Herbert A. Simon.
Human attention is a limited resource and influencing the mechanisms governing its allocation is the holy grail of advertisement. Our ICWSM'17 paper applies the recent HIP popularity modeling to further examine popularity under promotion and answer questions such as:
supplying the missing link between popularity and promotions
One major gap in understanding social media is to precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. Our recent WWW'17 paper supplies the missing link. We use a mathematical model to describe the continuous interaction between external promotions (e.g. tweets about a video) and popularity dynamics (e.g. daily views). This in turn answers several practical questions:
We analyze news sources on YouTube to reveal their roles in broadcasting information.
We are in an era when information consumption and production are democratized. Regular users not only consume information, but they digest, mutate and produce new information which gets passed on to other users. Prompted by a press inquiry from the Polish online news www.press.pl, we analyze the impact of these emergent sources of information versus traditional media, in the context of politics. More precisely, we study how YouTube videos posted by two traditional news sources (BBC news/UK, ABC news/USA) and two emergent online news sources (The Alex Jones Channel, The Young Turks) are viewed around the time of the US political elections of 2016.
Read MoreDrop us a line if you are interested in knowing more about our work, collaborating, or joining us.
The humanising machine intelligence project is recruiting two research fellows, see here.
We are not actively recruiting PhDs for 2021-2022, but if you have a strong track record and believe your interests and ours are a tight fit, feel free to drop us a line with your CV.